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Comment by cyberax | Hacker News Reader

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cyberax·

Also there's comparatively little oxygen available and almost no currents to mechanically break up large masses of tar.

Out of all fossil fuel extraction methods, deep-sea drilling is the worst.

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On the bright side it causes global warming

this is fine

How much of the ocean is deep sea vs not? Slow recovery doesn’t mean it’s the worst until you normalize it. Rare shallow but short life populations might be significantly more delicate

Significantly below the thermocline and/or in anoxic zones.

It depends on where you want to count the start of the deep sea in terms of depth, but the answer is somewhere between "most of it" and "almost all of it." Most of what we're used to is in the top 100 or so meters of the ocean, a very thin layer on top of the rest of the sea.

I'd say anything but the continental shelf (red on this map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_shelf#/media/File:...) counts as deep sea. That seems to also be the definition used by Deepwater Horizon, which was right at the edge of the continental shelf.

Nope, this is wrong. Deep sea drilling is what goes into the abyssal plains.

light penetrates in useful intensity for photosynthesis to about 200m so that seems like a decent cutoff for "deep sea" for the purposes of discussion around the unique communities there

Except that much/most of the life in that top 200m regularly commutes into the depths in pursuit of food/shelter/temperature. We all like sea turtles. Leatherbacks regularly dive to well over 1000m.

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